Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.
Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.
A lot of sarcasm here, but I fail to see how deregulation or Texas’s separate grid contributed to this problem. I see two main contributing factors:
The storm wasn’t projected to hit Houston this hard. The projected track had it making landfall way down the coast in Corpus Christi just 48 hours before, and the day before that it was projected to hit Brownsville, a solid 350 miles away. Houston was not projected to be the target until the last minute, so many people were caught unprepared, including Centerpoint Energy.
Houston’s tree canopy is massive. Sure, Houston has a ton of concrete and deforestation, but it remains on the edge of the Piney Woods, and especially in north and east Houston many areas are completely blanketed in hundred foot tall loblolly pines and sweetgums that are prone to breakage in hurricane force winds. Power lines were shredded, and many homes were damaged by falling trees
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps. If it were just a one-off event it might be able to be waved away, but a pattern of failure is emerging.
Whether the storm was projected to hit as hard or not doesn’t really matter, tropical storms and hurricanes are not some new event in that area of Texas, yet the state and local governments seem utterly unprepared. It was only a year or two ago that basically the exact same thing happened, and apparently nothing was done about it to shore up their services. It’s an inefficiency of the private sector, they’re not capable of providing vital services because their primary motivation is not reliability and efficiency, it’s profit and cost cutting.
You don’t see this happening in other states with the same frequency. I’ve never had the grid where I am fail, and we get both extreme heat and cold and occasional tropical storms.
Does it? We had the snow storm in 2021 that hit the news, but after that, are you lumping every local outage in Texas you see in the news together and blaming the “Texas grid?” People did the same thing when we had a severe ice storm here in Austin in Feb 2023 that knocked out power for several days. Well Austin has a municipal utility because we have not deregulated here, so Austin Energy was responsible for that one, and the problem was ice and trees. People were all over reddit blaming the “Texas grid” at the time, when the issue was ice and trees in a localized area.
Let me be clear I in no way support deregulation. I grew up in Houston when Houston Lighting & Power was our utility, though, and we had outages back then too, because we experience severe weather really often in Houston, and there are a bunch of trees that knock down power lines.
Are you saying you’ve never lost power to your house? I’m curious where you live where there aren’t pretty widespread outages after a hurricane that brings you several hours of 80mph sustained winds. Anyway my entire point was this outage in Houston has nothing to do with the “Texas grid” or deregulation. You could certainly criticize Centerpoint for not being better prepared to repair the outages, but the outages were going to happen regardless
Ercot literally said a month ago that they were planning rolling blackouts in August. Texas can’t handle itself under projected circumstances, so of course they will be fucked every time a disaster hits.
ERCOT says that every summer, but also that article says there’s a “12% chance” of rolling blackouts, not that they’re planning them. Last summer was our hottest on record, as it was many places, and there were no rolling blackouts. This summer in Texas hasn’t been nearly as hot as it was last year.
Here are similar articles about pretty much everywhere else:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-midwest-danger-rotating-power-blackouts-this-summer-2022-06-03/
https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-blackout-risks-across-u-s/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/us/storm-blackouts.html
Again, these outages are due to downed power lines, not ERCOT and not generating capacity. Does everyone here really not understand the difference lmao
Yes. We understand that the difference is the lack of redundancy in your grid due entirely to profiteering and cost cutting.
You’re literally the only person who has had anything productive to say here, so when you say “we,” I’m not sure who you’re referring to. Yes, better grid redundancy would mitigate outages. At the same time, I’d like to see any kind of evidence that Houston has poor grid redundancy compared to any other city of comparable density, or that “profiteering and cost cutting” have played a role.
My previous point stands that ERCOT and the Texas Interconnect being independent has absolutely nothing to do with this
Except that the only reason your grid is independent is so they can cut corners on quality and soak you for every penny they can. If they were connected to the rest of the country they’d have to conform to superior codes.
That’s not “the only reason” though? The Texas grid was created in like the 40s…today’s politics really didn’t apply
i hear you, fellow texan. no fan of ercot, but reading this thread has been infuriating.
for anyone else reading my comment - some years ago, i lived in oklahoma for a little while. years of drought, one year a lot rain. lots of trees with a lot dead branches weighted by new growth, then that winter an ice storm hit. trees bigger than my car came crashing down and it was all over the town i lived in. for three days in the silence, you could hear branches cracking and falling. two houses down a tree went right through their living room. one end of our street was impassable for several days until someone could cut one tree into small enough pieces to clear it.
needless to say, power was out. parts of town had power back within days, some parts of the state, if i remember correctly, didn’t have power for weeks.
grid stability or redundancy couldn’t have prevented that problem.
https://www.weather.gov/oun/events-20071208
Appreciate you. Outages like this happen all over the country when there are severe weather events, especially hurricanes. Folks on here seem to have a poor grasp of electrical systems and why the power’s out in parts of Houston
You fail to see it because you are a MAGA toadie.
wow…
How exactly do you “see” these factors, are you sure you’re not cognitive dissonancing? Storms change course all the time and those trees have been there for years. Being prepared for the occasional hurricane isn’t profitable.